LONELINESS AND SELF ACCEPTANCE

I wrote when I was feeling down one day, a while ago.

We all carry inside us pain. 

My pain is a deep, deep loneliness. Overrun with chills and shivers, I can feel the blood course throughout my body when I become lonely. I want to become infinitesimally small. I want to run. Hide. Go away forever. 

And yet I consider myself a loner. A loner because I feel like I could never make friends. Or, when I do, I fuck it up. Or, I’d move. Or I'd stop liking them as much as I used to and leave. Or some other bullshit reason I tell myself.

In reality, I still feel like I don’t really fit in anywhere. Everyone is so different from me, and I am so different from everyone else. The people I share the most similarities with, at least in terms of background growing up, I dislike the most. 

I remember going to school in 6th grade at some cliquey rich kid school. I hated it. Those people were a reflection of me in a way. They were what I could be. Some cliquey asshole guy. Some person who seeks acceptance and is willing to fit in despite not really liking the group they’re with that much. And then that was me for a while. The last part. I stuck with a group of people who I began to feel detached from. It was a waste of my and their own time.

And then I became free for a while. But making new friends is hard. 

It is my paradox of loneliness that I live with. I want enough human interaction to satiate me. But I also want to be left alone and independent. Maybe I should learn to truly be left alone and independent. 

How can you learn to love yourself if you don’t love who you are now? Do you become someone else? Or do you just accept that you’re flawed? If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t be writing this right now, I suppose. 

I should be honest. What you see from me is a facade, or, more so, a peek into who I am. I live a dual life. In the sense that who I am is suppressed because I don’t think people would accept me for who I am. Which is hard to say. But it has to be said. 

It’s not like I am a super villain or something. Or that I secretly hate everyone and everything. (although sometimes I do). It’s just that I'm not comfortable being vulnerable with people, because I don’t think i’m comfortable being vulnerable with myself. I don’t even know what I want. Or why I feel certain ways. Or why I feel nothing sometimes. 

I didn’t even open up to my parents when I was a kid and had horrible days at school. I just kept it inside of me. Or I said it was “good.” That’s all I would say. It was “good.” That’s my way of saying: stop asking me. And maybe I should’ve said something. But I didn’t. I did that. I lived with that. I still live with that. Even as I write this now, I can’t bring it upon myself to say how shitty I feel to other people. I feel alone and helpless sometimes. All because I am trapped in my own notions of who I ought to be. Rather than who I am. 

That is the ultimate pain: I lie to myself. For what reason? I don’t know. It doesn’t make me feel any better. But I've done more than ever before. By saying how I feel on this fake piece of paper. At least the fakeness is beginning to leave me through this fake paper. Through these words I’ve been writing.

And what I've begun to realize is it’s not about fitting in. It’s about being yourself. And being comfortable being yourself. Taking the losses that come with being yourself. Because some people just won't like you when you’re you. So why is it so hard to become comfortable with me being the only source of approval I need? 

But then I think, well, if I am to become comfortable with who I am I have to become comfortable acknowledging I lie. I lie to protect myself. To try and protect others. And I have to become comfortable acknowledging I’ve fucked up too many times to count. And I have to become comfortable acknowledging that I don’t know how to make connections with people. Becoming comfortable with my paradox. That I want to be lonely, but hate being lonely. How do we become comfortable with the contradictions of our lives? I am smart, yet I know I am dumb. I am quiet, yet I want to be heard. I am stoic, yet I do care. I don’t do things the “right” way or the “normal” way, yet I still do them. I hate when people lie, but then lie to everyone, including myself. 

You, well, you might know me. Or maybe you don’t. And if you are reading this, this was meant for me. What I discuss, you don’t know. You don’t have to know. You don’t need to know. Because what I do know, is that we all have to feel this way, right? It can’t just be me. Or maybe it is just me. Or maybe everyone else has solved this themselves, and I’m just lagging behind. But that’s okay, y’all. I am catching up. And I apologize for any pain I have caused. That is to myself.

It is hard to show such a stoic face and yet feel so much. I feel so much. So much pain. So much sadness. So much grief. And envy. But pride. And courage. But cowardice. And guilt. And fear. I mean I cry at damn near every movie I see. I don’t know why. Is it because I just bottle my emotions in so much that even the tiniest sad sight is relatable? Or is it because I just feel? And it’s a shame. Because I don’t know. Maybe it’s both.

I’ve tried to become more vulnerable over time. And I have. It’s hard for me to be vulnerable. Because I have some outside, and then internalized, notion that I am a stoic person. My own family told me I don’t smile. And that led to me telling myself: I don’t dance. I don’t sing in or out of the shower. I don’t talk nonsense to my dog. I don't do some weird thing with my vocal cords and make weird noises. 

Well I do. It’s just . . . I’m afraid to show you that. Only a few people know the silly voices I do. Only some people know I go dance sometimes (especially once the alcohol is flowing). Most people know I smile now, that’s changed. But a lot of people don’t know a lot about me. They know my ideas and my thoughts. My sarcastic responses (that is genuine). But they don’t really know me. To be fair, I can’t say I know myself that much either. I’ve repressed so much in the quest of acceptance that I probably lost things I knew. 

I want to tell you a funny story about that. The vocal cord thing. We used to have this African Grey named Natasha. She had seizures, but she was a super sweet bird. I loved her a lot. I don’t think my mom knew that. But I saw how much that bird meant to her. She was also just super silly and funny. Anyways, an African Grey is a parrot. And parrots parrot. So . . . yeah, the random deep throated weird noises the bird made back when she was alive? That was me. It all came from playing online on my playstation with my friends back in highschool, we’d do stupid shit. I had a lot of fun. 

I wish I could tell myself to just accept what I do and who I am and call it a day. But I can’t. And to those of my friends who accept me and care for me. Thank you. I try to be more vulnerable with y’all every day. Each of our friendships are different. In those relationships you all receive a different glimpse of me. 

Maybe I don’t accept myself because I never really believed in myself as a kid. I have these two rockstar parents who support me in everything I do and always backed me up in whatever I did. I don’t really know why I didn’t believe in myself. Probably because I was bullied and I let some brat kill my self-esteem. But you know what kid, fuck you. I’m able to write this today because I’ve been on a long journey to regain my self-esteem. To realize I do know what the hell I'm doing. To realize I am competent. That I can do what I want to do. 

I didn’t start realizing I can be my best self until I was a junior in high school. I was going through a breakup, my dog just died, my parents were getting divorced. It sucked. Mr. Dupre. That was my English teacher’s name. He doesn’t know it and probably never will. But the last paper he assigned us he told us we could write about anything. And he gave us free will to write how we wanted to. I think I wrote about climate change. He helped me realize I am a good writer. That my voice is worth putting out here, so it can be heard. Now surely there are other things that happened on the way. I started taking classes more seriously as a junior. But if I had to pick something I can remember as the starting point, it was that paper. 

Instead of wallowing in pain, I decided to write something. I’ve tried it before and have only gotten out a few sentences. I don’t really want to write more, I guess I could, but I don’t want to.

I was thinking of Plato’s cave allegory. You know it. Well i’ve been one of the people chained to the wall, having others tell me what X, Y, and Z things about myself are. This is, of course, a distorted reality, an illusion. I’ve started to realize my truth, as in, who I am, is whatever I define it as. Not what others define me as, but what I choose to be. The traits I choose to show to people. So, to the people I love, I apologize about letting others, including you, define who I am. Because I do have a lot more going on than what I show. And I hope I can be more vulnerable. You know my deepest pain now, but it’s something that I can, one day, stop using against myself. I am on a journey of self acceptance, and this is just one step. 

*********************************************************************************

Most of y’all know me as who I present myself as, but here is something I’ve been frightened to tell everyone, ever. And I’ve only published this because I did something vulnerable and let my mom read this. She encouraged me to publish this because she related to this. And it’s hard to think that the people you look up to ever felt the same. So thank you, mom—who I know doesn’t read what I write (because she doesn't know where I publish what I write). 

In all honesty, I have been writing a piece but I’m not satisfied with it nor do I feel super inspired by it. But it’s basically done. Although bar prep takes up a lot of time and energy, so my editor has been busy. I might just take the bar prep time off from any research/off the dome work and republish, with edits, two old essays I wrote in college that are more typical of what I write. Or maybe I’ll write another piece like this. Who knows. I hope I wrote something that you could relate to in some way.

Thanks for reading.

David Gross